Krysia Jopek

You should float in the sea to heal your open wounds.

Avoid the stretcher with the body that can’t surf air.

Salt gives the mouth more room.

The shrinking door or floor.

It’s hard to say.

When fire takes down the second floor, and the cathedral ceilings disembark—

you know you can’t go home anymore.

Oleaginous night turning clocks and black feather swans.

The moon might vent under the cloud river, but no one reads this story.

Life-size Russian dolls could interlock, then unlock a parade of wild particulars.

If human were a choice, fewer might graze the calendar, stare at our phones.

You’re multitasking on crack again—frenetically foraging false data.

Maybe lucid dreaming isn’t such a good idea.

Spells spill in Arabic at 2 AM.

The wind warned demise.

Side events drop the hardwood floor with winding banisters.

The canvas of sky and its pendant of sun dissipate dread for a weekend.

You should look away when the sports car crunches the guard rail.

Chinese Boxes interlock rooms for sleep-passage.

Tired rooms of spilled calligraphy.

Your laptop spoiling 5 AM.

The dog plays dead on his bed.

Some are sleeping.

Some are dreaming of horses caught in fire.

The last day of summer took the hero down.

When you stop believing in things, you become free.

Over-ripe grape and cherry tomatoes lose the rotting trellis.

On the stone marking incremental bloodshed, I sat with a paring knife to cut mythology down.

Heal me!, I cried in the language of the country I had studied for years.

No one recognized me, so I became a foreigner to history.

Take note of the nervous mourning doves on the electrical line fielding September wind.

Of the property of elasticity when the bitter vine chokes your rib cage.

The coat you’re threading with mercurial strings and steel blue buttons for winter.

Hours snare—an envelope of melancholic eiderdown guarding against a looming abyss.

Don’t stare into the gaping mouths of mountains.

Sirens won’t call you home where they won’t receive your elegant letters about vertigo and mis-remembered chances.

The old woman clenching her walking stick who stalks your dreams, refuses to call it a cane.

Days will go by.

The night of handsome stars dishevels faint moonlight.

We were encroaching answers while better questions wrote decisively on missing green stones.

All our wrongs drown in September’s river rush, somewhere pooled with strange kindness.

Unfortunate misdemeanors muddled plans to take over the excavations of buried dreams.

Oversized goats in someone else’s apartment grazed the emerald carpet before notebooks lost most pages.

The remaining soldiers, mere children without skin, knew the moon is impartial.

It watches as coins are counted by desperate mothers enumerating sorrows.

We chased sleep into houses with too many beds and not enough functioning doors.

Artificial intelligence wrote us encrypted memos to dodge rotating cubicles for the park while recruiting the newest blend.

Books never arrived.

Issues were skirted under slanted tabletops set for a dinner party that never drew close.

A drawer flew from the moving vehicle on a highway of trampolines and carousels.

I may have been there.

I don’t know.

Darkness lifts the wake of dreams.

The broken narratives untangle in small-window sunlight.

The boat left in the snow next winter harbors blackbirds you can count on two cold hands.

Let’s say the scars on your face shall heal.

The animal similarly afraid.

Forgive to surpass stupor.

It was a silly doodle.

It was a painting of calm.

The navigation from one world to another curtails the new picture of heartbreak on the dining room wall.

Sea water blurs the last blue-green map to you.

To think about not thinking about the mourning doves was still thinking about them.

So still in the backyard, talking of sorrow.

We had been navigating through childhood neighborhoods to rescue magnolias.

Driving diagonally through crisscrossed streets for a new point of view.

We drove the wrong car, the one that wasn’t paid for.

That was before the ghost of the house stole your newest watch.

Time isn’t helpful, one of us said.

The wind moved through us as if we were wind.

Our shortcomings mistranslated last Thanksgiving.

We left the tome of questions on the coffee table before one of us drowned.

The TV was out of touch.

We visited a museum built out of numbers.

Someone said, I’m an exhibit of deconstruction.

I’m a parallelogram.

I lost the horizon while I slept.

I danced with the old woman because she was already me.

When the windshield wipers broke, it was raining on the highway.

The model ship folded into an envelope on someone’s doorstep.

Strangers spoke of their dogs and how crowded Walmart was at night.

I was watching myself much later.

The river was swollen from snow uphill.

All intel indicated epitomes not epiphanies.

We burned our effigies in olive oil thunder away from the huddle of cows.

Night carried scents of smoke-wood and rain.

Nature buried her own somewhere we visited while dreaming.

Our unchronological stories bargained one kind of longing for loss.

We wanted to trade ill-thought-out careers for a week or two.

One hand clapping sounded like a heartbeat.

I slept in forsythia branches sprouting yellow stars but woke in daffodil bells.

The coyotes may have visited.

I can’t tell.

Winter froze violins under the lake in eighth notes.

Sheet music mocking ancient heroes too tired to navigate Thursday.

Proclamations became frozen birds in a reel of forgetting that the moon mourned lost footprints.

The children hoarded magic under porch light.

Shed behind the thickest trees, our words tired of us.

Our coats lined with notebooks no one knew how to read, armor for someone else’s heartbreak.

I was erasing personal espionage.

Hoping someone would scurry the trail towards openings in paragraphs.

When the queen abdicated in January, she left a note about silence.

They say electrical currents won’t ameliorate the abstract plummet.

That the king wanted an explanation for a running out of town.

We were good until we couldn’t be good anymore.

Mismatched melodies about subletting suffering.

No one knew how to take it really.

Profound slogans in front yards.

When the angels in the script were no longer enamored of us, we sent fan mail to glaciers set into free-fall.

The penguins discussing hierarchy.

I became my mother without a cane of roses.

Rumors under lightbulbs that didn’t work anymore.

A Christmas tree of errant doll postcards.

We might celebrate composure when the bullet hits its mark and breath dismantles the sky’s promises.

We were ice fisherwomen who cut out the violins and cut our hands on strings.

There must be an explanation for some of this.

It was more difficult when others watched the inevitable splintering.

Other times, being unseen for too long was dangerous.

When all was said and done, the finish line might be cursory illusion.

The start gate, after all, had been jarring, to say the least.

The obstacle course in the scavenger hunt could subside with the fluffing of pillows.

One hoped for special effects while stringing the talismans onto a wrist band without a clear narrative.

The stop sign was stolen when one slipped out of focus.

I had forgotten to use permanent ink, and the sudden rain encrypted my sentences written to an estranged beloved who would sleep through winter anyway.

The mail carrier sings the same song every morning, which some days I find comforting.

The refrain often follows under eaves that don’t terrify completely.

When three hawks fly overhead, slicing the sky, they form a perfect triangle without a familiar beginning, middle, or end.

Their beating wings don’t cast shadows or substantially change anything, yet a feeling takes shape, a balloon that lifts the horizon.

Then the fog comes to erase my memories, my wanderings through the forest at night seeking absolution.

Sometimes the answer is another question spiraling.

Crooked hallways lead into stranger houses.

Books lining shelves mocking mirrors.

Bereft and disenchantment become synonyms that can’t fill a pitcher, pour out an anodyne.

Not every day’s a page worth salvaging.

We imagined the stars’ aptitude, powdered bones of our dead encased in glass.

I wanted to assist someone, anyone really. but I was busy drowning meaningless souvenirs.

Transgressions could be experiment’s unfortunate delay.

Things became so multi-layered, the mirror couldn’t do anything but multiply.

No strands of gray or white hair, the scalp’s genetic birthmark, could be expunged.

The manifesto targeted the ones dreaming in dumpsters.

When the storm hit, the ships unmoored moonbeams.

The wind doesn’t say where it has been even though I listen.

I could sleep only when church bells rang or when I located my grandmother’s purple dragon broach.

The stray dog has soot in its mouth and was frightened by anyone calling until the shaking of small stones.

Should you visit, I may not hear you if I’m once again painting noise.

The apple pie might burn while I dust for ghosts in the basement.

Don’t be alarmed by the clanging of.

Trial drugs would be money-makers, stock raisers, but no one believes, life rafts.

The disease could mutate a handful of times by the time you read this.

Ancient sages in a bamboo forest are sculpting giant hands to wave to eternity.

The applause craved occurs in increments like melody.

I discarded all time pieces to know myself better.

I missed the ticking when I wake, dislocated.

My attic room was an essay and multiple-choice exam.

The subject morphed while ideas receded the brain’s windows.

The lone race typified for typewriters.

Someone might tell the mother of the girl who studying under columbines during lunchtime that she needs a better coat.

The others are always throwing a ball, inventing new names for lost rabbits.

I wouldn’t say I was scared to any applicable parties.

The invitation came too late to RSVP properly.

I wanted to bring wine and align in time for the bonefire.

They echoed while I separated again, hiding from puddles.

Tomorrow I will be better, but I wasn’t sure if it was Friday or Saturday.

I’ll sew delicate curtains and invite the ghosts upstairs.

The news loops and re-loops until tomorrow’s loop loops the next tomorrow.

We are cloning light blue beaded swallowtails before frost settles in.

The storm windows are winning us in light only painters can manipulate.

Words are trite in the backdrop of war, but someone needs a distraction.

Boys play golf in the field, worried about a physics test.

Next month’s money slips through unfortunate calculations.

The cello, though restrung, has forgotten the Chorus.

Those beatified have crystalized new stained glass windows.

Things hurt in new places.

Last night I was something more interesting.

Last night I wasn’t preoccupied with home.

I swept the sun from the garage floor because everything hurt in reverse, and I couldn’t climb up to catch the autumn leaves as if someone were listening.

No one shows up for the conversation about Monday mediocrity at the broken mailbox or rusted fire pit that the rain claimed from memory.

I couldn’t help burning the contract with myself to turn the layers inside out with the patience of daffodil bulbs and daylight.

The streetlight will mock the moon after darkness sets her onyx wings to enclose us without a soundtrack, without a sound.

I applied for the job of holding things during the relay race toward knowledge that doesn’t follow the chipmunk underground, shatter windows, or make chimneys crumble when we’re asleep in dreams of splendor.

It’s funny how the house pretends to know us, we pretend, before the next day might begin its shivering.

There should be someone to call in your contacts to explain the measurements of hours that meander, but not exponentially or terribly eloquently—blankly.

The owl holds winter in her feathers and will continue writing her sestina. Wing bones, like the bones in one’s hand, take forever to heal.

Dark so early, dinner might last all night without a book to write, without a fight with eternity.